Uncle Obe's Tale

“Boys,” said Deacon Boley, “these meetings of the Sourwood Men’s Temperance Union are mighty slow getting off of the ground.”

The Union was formed back yonder during the Great Depression, and there was about a dozen of us when it first started, but after a few weeks we had dwindled down to five or six regular members.

“Instead of just telling how our old ladies decided we was to quit drinking,” the deacon went on, “why don’t we take turns telling the most amazing drinking experience we ever had? Maybe something that got us to consider turning over a new leaf?”

Uncle Obadiah Purvis spoke up.

“I can tell you what happened to make me quit drinking, and the old lady didn’t have nothing to do with it.”

Uncle Obe hardly ever said anything at one of these meetings, so everybody looked towards him setting in a cane-bottom chair in the corner, and he told this story.

One day back in the summer, when the plant whistle blowed for quitting time, me and Stevie Lee stopped by the saloon for a beer. Stevie had more money than I had, so I left first. Still, I was maybe three sheets to the wind when I started home up the gravel road. When I got to the quarry on top of the mountain, all of the trucks and workmen were gone, and I set down to rest on a big sandstone block at the edge of the quarry.

I was thinking of getting out my pipe and pouch and lighting up, when out of the corner of my eye I seen something move. You know when you’re hunting, you get the habit of not moving too quick, so I turned just enough to get me a clear sideways view towards the bed of the quarry. Moving slow, about knee-high offen the ground, was something shiny, shaped like a football and maybe six foot long. All of a sudden it settled down in the sandy bed of the quarry and stopped. Flabbergasted though I was, I knowed it was real. I had been a lot drunker before and never saw things that wa'nt there.

A hole opened up in the side of the thing, and a little man maybe a foot high slithered out. Soon as that one hit the ground, another one come out right behind him, and both of them stood up and looked straight at me. Their eyes looked like little shiny dots from where I set. I tried to jump up and run, but my legs wouldn’t hold me up. I decided I’d just have to bluff my way out of it. Maybe a big noise would scare them away, so I give a whoop like you holler at the dogs when they’ve treed a coon.

“Whoooo-eeee!” I yelled. “What are y'all doing upon this here mountain?”

The little men jumped about a foot and grabbed onto each other. They looked more spooked than I felt. They didn’t open their mouths, but I could hear something in my head like regular talking, only real proper, like a radio announcer.

“If you please, sir, could you tell us what sector of the galaxy this is? Some of our navigation instruments have failed, and we are not sure how far we are from home.”

“Lost, are ye?” I said, real bold-like, beginning to get over my scare. I pointed to the gravel road going down the mountain. “Down thataway is Selby.” Then I pointed east. “And if you go far enough yonder way, you’ll hit old Mount Cheaha.”

The two manikins put their heads together like they was jabbering at each other, but their mouths still didn’t move.

“Speak up, there!” I hollered. “If y'all expect any help, ye’ll have to say so.”

I heard this voice again in my mind or my brain.

“Sir, we would like to know where we can find an instrument to aid us in our journey home.”

All I could think of that might help them was an old carbide light that I take along when I go hunting, and I reckon they heard me thinking, because the voice in my head spoke again.

“No, no, not a light. We need an instrument, to calculate the angles and distances between the stars.”

“Why, I’ll be!” I thought. “I bet I’ve got the very thing, right here in my jumper pocket som’ers.”


I felt around in my jacket and pulled out a slingshot whittled out of hickory wood, with black inner tube strips and a leather pouch for the rock. My cousin Tom had made it for my oldest boy, I was taking it home to him. I chucked it across the sand and it landed by the men’s feet.

“See what you can do with that, boys,” I said. “Sight through the fork of it at any star you want to shoot at. I gyarntee hit’ll work.”

Which was a lie, but I just wanted to get shut of them and go home.

The two men looked at each other kind of hopeless like, but one of them stooped over and picked it up. This is the spookiest part of all. When he stood up with it in his hand, the slingshot was the same size in proportion to him as it had been to me when I was holding it. They handed it back and forth between them, and every now and then one of them would hold it up and pull the rubber strips back, or look through the fork towards the evening star that was shining brighter every minute. Finally one of them nodded his head at the other feller, then both of them looked
at me.

“The device looks simple enough,” said the voice. “We believe it will take us where we want to go. Once we are beyond the distorting effects of your atmosphere, we should be able to make the necessary calculations. What will you take in exchange for this instrument, sir?”

I figured the slingshot was worth at least three beers.

“Well, now,” I said, “hit’s a real good sling, ought to fetch at least seventy-five cents. Maybe eighty.”

“Sir,” the voice said, “we are not familiar with your barter system. Perhaps an artifact would interest you. Would you care to have a small memento which we picked up on a satellite of your star system’s largest planet?”

I was disappointed but wanted to be good-natured about it.

“Shore,” I said. “If yens have got no money, any little thing will do. I can see ye’re in a tight, and I always stand ready to help out a stranger in trouble.”

One of the men knelt in the sand beside his little blimp and slid through the side of it. Then he crawled back out, dragging a big shiny doo-lolly shaped sort of like a watering can, with a spout on one side and a handle on the other.

“This,” the voice says to me, “is a relic of the civilization, now extinct, that once flourished among the satellites of the great mottled planet. Its function, we have discovered, is to turn things backward. There is evidence that its most recent effect was to turn one of the great planet’s satellites backward in its orbit. So whenever you wish something to go backward rather than forward, simply point this nozzle toward the object and press this lever down.”

Whilst he was talking, he aimed the nozzle at a lightning bug that was flying around and flashing its little light. When he pushed the handle down, that bug went zooming backwards down the tram track and out of sight.

He set the shiny thing down in the sand, and before I could hardly blink my eyes, both of the little men jumped through the side of that blimp, and it shot up in the sky like the wolfeener was after it. Before it disappeared I heard the voices again in my head. They was laughing like hyeners, and the laughing conjured up a lot of pictures of things going backwards that I didn’t like to think about.

I walked over to the shiny thing and looked it over. Hit was a lots bigger than it had looked before, about the size of a five-gallon bucket. Under the handle was a gap so the handle could move up and down. I picked up a piece of flint from the ground and wedged it into the gap so the handle couldn’t be moved by accident. I looked around the quarry for a place to bury the thing, but between me and the blasted out rock cliff I spied the sinkhole. The water was still and shiny as a black mirror. Y'all know that the quarry men say the sinkhole is a bottomless pit.

I picked up the outlandish thing by the sides, not touching the spout or the handle, and toted it the hundred feet or so to the sinkhole. When I let it down into the pool, it disappeared, and the black water just bubbled once and lay shiny in the twilight again.

I don’t know if anything could make a world whirl backwards, or a tree grow down instead of up, or any such doings. And I don’t know if two beers, or even three or four drinks, could cause a feller to make up a happening like this in his head. But I know I aint had a drink since then, except at the shivaree last month for the wedding of one of the Stracener gals.